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On the Margins – Jews and Muslims pdf download

Book Title On The Margins
Book AuthorGerdien Jonker
Total Pages272
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LanguageEnglish
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On the Margins – Jews and Muslims in Interwar Berlin By Gerdien Jonker

ON THE MARGINS

Book’s Introduction

This book is a spinoff from my previous one, The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress. While conducting research on the Lahore-Ahmadiyya Muslim reform movement, which was operating in Berlin during the interwar years, I came across a curious photograph.

 Taken in Berlin in 1935, it depicts a group of boys and girls standing and kneeling on a Persian carpet, which, judging from its size, was a prayer mat. The children are frozen, as if in a still-life, in a garden with a meadow and some shrubbery.

Their ages range from about six to sixteen and they look exactly like children did at that time and in that place. The boys are wearing short trousers and wide collars and the girls have ribbons in their bobbed hair.

They tilt their smiling faces to the camera. A vaguely proprietorial looking man in a three-piece suit is posing next to the carpet with his hands casually shoved into his back pockets. The caption reads, ‘Muslim children receive religious instruction from the Imam of the Berlin Mosque, Dr S.M. Abdullah’.1

Through my research, I already knew Dr Abdullah.2 I had learned that his predecessor had built a mosque in Berlin in 1924, that he had invited the Berlin population to join hands between ‘East and West’, and that, when taking his place in 1928, Abdullah had encouraged intellectual exchange and intercultural marriage.

In the photographs featuring the mosque community, I had noted an increase in mixed couples with babies in their arms.3 Now, for the first time, I wondered whether those children were still alive.

Although unable to trace any of the children in the actual photograph, during my research I was able to establish contact with some of their descendants in a wide range of geographical places, including Warsaw, Stockholm, Woking, Jerusalem, Mumbai and Cape Town.

With some, I conducted lengthy email exchanges in which they shared their memories and sent me letters and photographs. Others I was able to meet.

During those visits I was shown the various heirlooms they kept in their homes and listened to their stories. Four times I faced the towering task of making an in-depth analysis of a collection of papers and documents.

There is a growing literature on the shared interests of Jews and Muslims in the twentieth century, in places ranging from the Russian Empire and Baltic Sea countries to Morocco and Palestine.4

In such different regions, under particular historical circumstances, Jews and Muslims saw themselves ‘as groups with intertwined histories, cultures, beliefs, even blood’.5

Nonetheless, finding references to Muslims in Jewish family archives and vice versa in Berlin in the interwar years, came to me as a surprise and, after my first such discovery,  I deliberately started to look for more. The search brought to light a small network that covered a series of overlapping circles.

Although Jews and Muslims in interwar Europe have been studied independently, with each new find it became increasingly evident that the relationships between them had been overlooked. In this study, I propose to describe the micro and macro religious histories that their meetings implied.

I apply the term network in a pragmatic sense here.6 It is crucial that the communication happened in a defined space and time, occurred at different levels and included several friendship circles and personal networks. I found photographs of mixed (Jewish and Muslim) couples at iftar meals, New Year dances, and marriage parties.

 I read letters that described their friendship and student circles, and in the course of my research, I learned about personal networks, work contexts and regular places of meeting. The exploration of shared interests showed in every document.

Assumptions presented themselves. With each meeting and each private archive, it became increasingly obvious that the encounters between Jews and Muslims in the interwar years had encompassed visions of the world at large and had been given shape in the participants’ private lives.

In its different activities, the group seemed to encircle the same amalgam of topics, in which religious renewal, reform of the self, political independence, and equality

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